Loudcloud

“The first company I founded, Lovecloud, which then became Opsware, was so difficult that I never, I like in life since then, like we like we've had difficulties building the firm, whatever, but like they never got like a rise out of me that could compare to, y…”

“When I was on the board of Mark's first company Loud Cloud, they were dealing in an area that frankly, I really at the beginning in 1999 didn't understand it because they were talking about the cloud. I don't think anybody we were selling to understood what th…”

“You know, we went public with two million dollars in trailing 12 months revenue at 18 months old, right? Like in the, like, that's obviously a bad idea. I mean, like, there's no question that wasn't a bad idea, but the truth of it was the alternative because w…”

“And the thesis was is that sevens kill companies. And what that means is that, you know, when someone is a four, you just know they're not doing the job, they're not up for it, and let's, let's take them out of the system. But the problem with the seven Is tha…”

“Ben Horowitz and I spent a bunch of time raising this very large round. We raised a hundred and twenty million dollars at an eight hundred and twenty million dollar post money valuation, right?”

“We definitely would not have survived as a company if I hadn't just admitted to myself that things might not get better in the kind of funding environment.”

“That was probably the single best decision I've ever made, just to go like, how do you know you're at the bottom? You're not sure at the bottom.”

“We went two million to fifty seven million dollars in one year.”

“And from five of us to about 650 employees in the same time.”

“We founded the company in 1999. We went public in 18 months later, and then we pivoted the whole thing 12 months after that.”

“Our largest customer went out of business, H-Reacts, which made it impossible for us to raise any money. They had us twenty five million dollars at the time.”

“And as soon as we disclosed that we lost 50% of our market cap and we couldn't raise the money.”

“And I think at the end, only about 10% of the code base was the original. Loud cloud software.”

“I started my career at LoudCloud, which was a cloud company, maybe 10 years or eight years too early.”

“We were called the IPO from hell. Like, literally, Business Week ran a whole story called the IPO from hell, which was my IPO.”